Analysing Magazine Advertisments for Music Artists

We looked at a number of magazine advertisements in order to gain some ideas of codes and conventions of a typical magazine advertisement for an artist within our chosen music genre. One of the ones we looked at was Ellie Goulding.

Ellie Goulding Magazine Advertisment

Through looking at the adverts we have found a number of factors. One of which being that the artists name is always displayed on the advert, and always very clearly, and boldly, in order to make it very clear what the advertisement is for. The name is always displayed in the same logo that the artist uses to promote herself. For example with Ellie Goulding, she uses the one displayed on the image above, much defined lettering. The writing becomes what an audience associates as a particular artist. Therefore this is something we definitely want to do.

We have also found that the advert will discuss an album, and that it will display reviews from a variety of sources, describing their thoughts of it, these will always be positive, obviously to encourage people to purchase the album themselves. We really liked this, and again, felt it was something we definitely wanted to include upon our own magazine advertisement.

Another factor we found was that, the image of the artist, was not always clear. For example Ellie Goulding's magazine advert, does not show her looking at the camera, the image is side on. Therefore it is not automatically clear as to who the advert is about, minus the name. At first we thought this was not a good idea to try to do and planned to challenge it more, doing something like the 'Jessie J' magazine advertisement where it is made very clear who the artist is. However after more consideration we felt it was a really great way to become more creative and to hint and tease at the audience who is the advert is referring to, whilst making it very clear who it is through the title in order to attract people to it more.

Jessie J Magazine Advertisment

We learned from the Jessie J advert, that it is traditional to display the name of the album they are promoting but to also include mentions of popular songs from the album, in order to entice audiences more. We really liked this idea, and felt it would really make our piece clear that it was a magazine advertisement not a poster.

We really learned alot through studying the adverts, and i feel this has really benefited us as we come to make our own.